In the bookstore these years, when I saw Hawthorne's "The Scarlet Letter", I would think of the excitement of reading this novel in the early 1980s, and every friend would talk about it. What you can't appreciate by reading a book now. The film "The Scarlet Letter" (also translated "Red Forbidden Love" 1995), adapted from this famous book by Roland Joffe, interprets this famous book from multiple angles. Wenders' adaptation of the film "The Scarlet Letter" of the same name has a different flavor, or it is more in line with people's expectations for the novel. Wenders has done his best. More importantly, here brought out the cute little "Alice" Yella, and brought him the timeless classic "Alice in the City" a year later, but only said "The Scarlet Letter" here.
In the film, the small island in the corner of the British colony in Massachusetts Bay is not as quiet as we thought. As long as there are people in the place, the undercurrent will be surging quietly. Human behavior is always the same as monsters, not to mention that in the tip of the iceberg in the New World in the seventeenth century, in the Puritan colonial society, a young woman had an affair with a local man when her husband disappeared. The heroine Sith. (Demi Moore) exposes adultery because of her pregnancy.
To everyone's surprise, she would rather accept the harsh punishment of the Kojima stick-wielder—wearing a dress embroidered with a scarlet A for life, rather than revealing her lover's name. The sudden return of Sith's doctor husband adds drama to the ambivalence of the entire narrative. The husband, who seemed to be a master of medicine, took this opportunity to trace the identity of his wife's adulterer and take revenge, desperately provoking a fierce conflict between the Indians and the local whites.
The strange thing is that the pastor Arthur, who eventually became the lover, after being frightened and fainted, could no longer hold back his deeply buried emotions, and decided to escape from the island with Sith and the child. But the sacred religious belief seemed to make the pastor find out in his conscience that in order to save Sith, he resolutely returned to the church, boldly stated his identity as a lover, and then fainted again. In the dark room, the priest Arthur is murdered by a cruel powerful man. Only the footsteps of Sith running away with the cute little girl, because the cunning husband led the Indians to kill her and her daughter, but fortunately they escaped unharmed.
Where does love go, this seems to be a false proposition.
At least at that time, the pursuit of happy love was a joke about life. In other words, women are just a good card in the hands of men. As the so-called turning over and covering their hands with rain, they can act recklessly and take the opportunity to attack dissidents. In fact, to put it bluntly, no one in that special situation violates their customized "doctrine" and can still be safe. There is really no other way to go except to resign to fate, or to escape by chance.
British director Roland Joffe popularized the plot. In the depths of feelings, there will always be a glimmer of light, as if to tell the passion in the dark. Overall, the character performance is slightly thin. Although there are shortcomings, in terms of the difficulty of adaptation, it should be said that it is not easy.
When the gust of wind swept across the small island opposite the New World with the "scarlet letter", all the signs in the world would be darkened. If humans were still in a Puritan society, what else could they do? At most, as Lu Xun said, let's sleep in the iron room, never wake up, it will be more painful to wake up, because we have nowhere to escape.
2005.6.9
View more about The Scarlet Letter reviews
